Wilcox Industries to set up first overseas factory in Australia
Aquaterro and Wilcox Industries will set up a joint-owned factory in Australia, which will cost $10 million and create 100 jobs.
Fairfax reports approval from the US State Department had been given for Wilcox to set up a site in Australia, which will be its first overseas plant.
Aquaterro is a supplier of Wilcox’s tactical products to the Department of Defence.
”We had the Australian Defence Force come to us and to Wilcox and say … ‘we are side by side in the mountains with our American counterparts and we need to be able to keep pace with that and be interoperable with them at that same level… can you help’,” Graeme Bulte, CEO of Aquaterro, told Fairfax.
“The details of what we provided I can’t give you, but we turned around a problem that they’d had been dealing with for about a decade and fixed in inside of 60 days. Virtually every soldier deployed to Afghanistan from the point onwards was outfitted in that capability.”
Victoria, South Australia and Queensland are reportedly being considered for the Australian site. Wilcox chose to establish a facility in Australia because of the value it saw in being close to its customers.
